My paintings transform my family’s refugee history into a vibrant, multi-layered narrative that reframes suffering as resilience and ordinary life as extraordinary. I shift dominant narratives away from a lens of trauma and instead highlight inherited generational fortitude. As the granddaughter of North Korean and Franco-Spanish refugees, and the daughter of parents who fled dictatorships in Uruguay and Argentina, I inherited a legacy of resilience and hope. This family history of sacrifice and survival fuels gratitude for my fragile existence, driving me to illustrate my mundane daily life as radiant and bright, patterned scenes. Occasionally presented as one image stretched onto several canvases, my paintings mirror the impossibility of fitting my mixed Latina-Asian-Spanish-American identity into one single frame. By shifting narratives away from victimhood, I spark dialogue on strength, transformation, and the richness of human possibility.
Jennifer Lugris's work has been honored with numerous awards, with solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Richmond Art Center, Los Medanos College, Merced College, and Verge Center for the Arts, and has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the City of Sacramento, and Wexford Science and Technology. Her paintings have found permanent homes in collections at the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Facebook, and UC Davis Health. Lugris earned her MFA from UC Santa Barbara and now lives in Sacramento, CA, where she enjoys life as an artist, wife, and mother to three young children.
Curriculum Vitae
Curriculum Vitae